


Birthday Absent

by e_cat



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (the title might be a little mean...), Adam isn't there all that much honestly, Gen, Happy birthday?, I also have no idea when Noah's birthday actually is, M/M, TRK spoilers, and the pynch is really more background than foreground, let's just pretend it's in like December, sorry about that, this is a lot about Noah without Noah actually being there, this is maybe the least uplifting birthday fic I could have written without killing someone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 08:04:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7883182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/e_cat/pseuds/e_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blue and Ronan pay a visit to the cemetery on a very special day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Birthday Absent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [klainederful](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klainederful/gifts).



> Happy birthday! This is probably a terrible present, but maybe you'll like it anyways? I totally meant for it to be happy, I swear; it just kind of got away from me... I'm so sorry. ~~Honestly, you may just want to read it when it's not your birthday.~~
> 
> (Also, belated disclaimer: characters belong to Maggie Stiefvater.)

There’s a funny thing about details: you never know which ones you’ll remember. Blue remembered that it had been a Sunday when they’d found Noah’s bones; she remembered the smell of rain, of leaves; she remembered how soft and _earthy_ the soil had been. She remembered Noah’s grin on the driver’s license, somehow seeming to hold more teeth than the skull itself. She didn’t remember the date.

But that wasn't all. Blue remembered the feeling of the sun on her skin at the funeral; she remembered the feeling of her hand cramping around the shovel handle later; she remembered picking dirt from under her fingernails for days after. She remembered touching the headstone sorrowfully, the cool, rough feel of it on her palm. _She didn’t remember the date._

“Do you need a moment alone with the spirits, Sargent?” Ronan snapped, his words soaked in acidic sarcasm. He hadn’t needed to speak so cruelly to draw Blue out of her own head, but she knew that he’d done so only because he was missing Noah just as fiercely as she was. She also knew that he was right; they hadn’t come out here to stare at the edge of the cemetery.

“You’re just mad that Adam couldn’t come,” Blue shot back. It was a small bit of kindness, she thought, that she wasn’t bringing up the rawest of the emotions hanging in the cold air. She tried to feel like that was a good thing, and began to pick her way around headstones. After a moment, Ronan started after her. His steps were quick, certain, but Blue could see how much care he was taking to avoid stepping on anyone’s footstone. She chose not to mention it.

“Are you sure your mom is right?” Ronan asked, almost hopefully, when they had nearly reached their goal. “Maybe he’ll come back.”

Blue glanced at him. “Ronan,” she said, the word quiet and weighed down by sorrow. She stopped walking, giving herself another delay.

Ronan looked away. “Don’t,” he warned.

“Ronan,” Blue persisted, only partly because she hated to be told not to do something. “He was miserable like that – you know he was. And –” She took a breath, willing herself to say what she didn’t want to admit. “Ronan, his existence was tied to Cabeswater.”

There was a long pause. “You’re saying that we killed a friend,” Ronan concluded. His expression was dark, awful, horrified.

Blue shook her head. She had to remind herself not to get defensive, considering that she _had_ killed one of their friends. For both their sakes, she stressed, “We _saved_ a friend. Noah was already dead. He was already fading away.”

Ronan wouldn’t look at her; instead, they both watched the toe of his sneaker crash through half-dead grass. Blue knew that he still felt guilty, though it was unclear whether he was sharing the blame or attempting to carry it all himself. Ronan was born in magic and raised on dreams, and somehow he’d learned a sense of responsibility for those closest to him, but he’d never really learned how to admit that he couldn’t protect someone, that there was nothing more he could have done. He didn’t know how to be helpless. Then again, being helpless wasn’t exactly something that Blue excelled at, either.

Neither of them were willing to set aside pride long enough to end the awkward silence, and so awkward silence kept its reign. Winter wind, however, was not polite enough to stay as still as its two victims, and Blue’s resolve was waning fast. She caved twice, in quick glances meant to uncover whether Ronan’s stubbornness was as weakened as her own. On the third glance, Ronan met her eyes.

There was only a split second before both of them remembered that they were supposed to be ignoring each other, but even as they turned away again on instinct, Blue recognized that that instant had been enough to come to a silent ceasefire. This was confirmed a moment later when Ronan lobbed a balled-up scarf at her head. As explanation, he grumbled, “You’re too short, Maggot; you probably freeze twice as fast as the rest of us.”

Blue replied with a scowl, but she was grateful for the scarf as she wrapped it around her neck. “You probably freeze faster without hair,” she shot back, simultaneously a peace offering and a provocation. The atmosphere that had formed of heavy thoughts, both spoken and not, cleared away with the return to familiar territory, and suddenly the chilly air was a lot easier to breathe. Ronan’s equally withering glare was colored, too, with a hint of relief. He made a big show of pulling the hat Adam had given him from his pocket and shoving it onto his head, and Blue smirked with an easiness that wouldn’t have been possible in minutes prior. It didn’t last.

“Can we go to the fucking gravestone now?” Ronan demanded, his voice sour with the irritability he’d slathered over any cracks in his defenses. And just like that, the choking seriousness of the occasion came snapping back like it had been spring-loaded. It seemed impossible that Blue could have forgotten even for a second that they were here to visit Noah’s grave, but that was exactly what had happened. It was as if life had just flooded into the empty space left in Noah’s absence, as if he’d never been there at all. How depressing that the rest of the world moving on could happen so naturally, like people’s lives slammed to a stop every day. Someday, it wouldn’t be strange or terrible or sad that they would never see Noah again; it would just _be_. Blue dreaded that day more than anything else.

“Yes,” she said, because freezing time away in the middle of a cemetery wasn’t going to bring Noah back or keep the rest of the world from going on without him. Blue shook off her frost-stiffened immobility, taking a step like coming to life. It felt like the pain of loss ripping through her fresh.

It only took a few steps before Blue could pick out Noah’s grave. It felt almost odd seeing it in winter now, just another stone in a sea of them. Dying was such a pedestrian act: everyone did it eventually – if you were Richard Campbell Gansey III, you might even do it more than once – but there was still something so shocking about loss. Dying was so ordinary, but it never felt like it. Even though Blue had never known Noah alive, and even though she knew that he was better off freed from the troubles of ghostly existence, the grief and finality of a headstone felt like a deeply personal attack.

Blue stopped in front of the headstone, and suddenly she was so grateful for Ronan’s presence at her side. Visiting a grave was a lonely and chilling thing to begin with, but the icy wave that now cut through her veins had nothing to do with that. She grabbed onto Ronan’s arm; she needed something to hold onto while the world was turning itself inside-out around her. “Ronan,” she whispered, unable to speak anything louder or more substantial.

“Yeah,” Ronan breathed. He sounded as stricken as she was, and Blue felt certain that if she looked now, she would find the rare sight of Ronan with his emotions showing right on his face. But she couldn’t look away from the stone.

“Ronan, that’s today,” she hissed, as if anything else could have so completely floored them both. The completely odd thing was that this had been bothering Blue for nearly two weeks now, this question of Noah’s birthday. It had been nearly a whim to visit the grave today, even when she might have found the answer just as easily with an internet search. It seemed like an impossible coincidence that this could be Noah’s birthday, and Blue had learned not to believe in coincidences.

“Yeah,” Ronan repeated. He didn’t sound like he’d regained any of his composure, and Blue couldn’t blame him. She hadn’t really come to terms with the idea of Noah being gone completely, and she certainly wasn’t ready to consider that he might still be around in small ways, that he could gently redirect her thoughts without her even realizing it. Noah had done some pretty creepy things as a ghost, but somehow, the possibility of an absent Noah invading her thought processes was the worst of all. Blue didn’t want to mind, but she did; after all, a person’s thoughts were all that really and truly belonged to them.

Blue might have stood there all day, trying to wrap her head around the strangeness of the world, but Ronan, once he'd recovered from the shock of it, was not one to be still in the face of something he didn’t understand. He shook Blue’s hand from his arm and stalked back the way they’d come. Blue kept her eyes forward, but she let them drift down a bit. If the glaring date on the stone hadn’t been enough, the gifts in front would have served as confirmation. It was both strange and comforting to be reminded that their little group didn’t have the monopoly on missing Noah, though it was maybe true that they didn’t miss the same version of him.

At the foot of Noah’s headstone, there was an unopened bottle of schnapps, a princess-themed party hat, a new deck of playing cards, and a paper raven, presumably pilfered from Aglionby’s Raven Day. They were all clearly very personal tokens, chosen for some significance to Noah or Noah’s memory, but what really struck Blue was how temporary they all were. Wind or rain or passersby would rob the grave of its adornment probably within the week, and then Noah’s stone would be lost to its lonesome existence once more. Noah wasn’t even here to enjoy them, which made Blue wonder whether they should return his bones.

Before she could contemplate further, however, a sick thump sounded from behind her. Blue turned to discover that Ronan had found an outlet for his emotions, and was now slamming his fist into a tree at the edge of the cemetery. He was angry, because he didn’t know how to be helpless.

Hoping to stop him before he did any serious damage, Blue jogged over to Ronan. “That looks healthy,” she commented sarcastically as she approached. “What are you going to do next? Kick over a headstone? Knock down a building? Please, tell me what destructive ideas you have in mind.”

Ronan rested his forehead and fists against the tree. “Shut up,” he mumbled. “Shut up, shut up.”

Blue took another step forward and rested her hand on his back. “You’re going to hurt the tree,” she said more gently, and he laughed with an awful humor. The tension in his shoulders said that he wasn’t done, but he let her steer him away, back towards the car. Halfway there, his muscles slumped in surrender, a sort of hopeless numbness that was written across every inch of him.

“Get in the car,” Blue ushered, shoving Ronan into the passenger’s seat of the BMW. He didn’t protest, which told the state of his mind better than any blood on a tree trunk. Blue climbed in behind the wheel and took a couple of minutes to make some serious adjustments to the seat and mirrors, and Ronan still didn’t comment. She took a deep breath and bit her lip as she started the car; though she’d learned stick shift in Gansey’s car, she’d yet to drive Ronan’s. It listened to her better than the Pig did, which meant that she nearly backed over the curb. And yet Ronan didn’t blink.

To Blue's relief, however, after a couple of minutes on the road, he asked, “Where are we going?” Most of the time, Ronan sounded like he didn’t care, but usually he made it sound like it was because he had more important concerns that the rest of the world wasn’t privy to. Now, he just sounded like he didn’t care.

Blue glanced over at him, her hands tight around the wheel. He didn’t look completely blank, but he was studying his bloody knuckles without any suggestion that he intended to do anything about them. “I’m dropping you off with Adam,” she informed him, watching from the corner of her eye for a reaction. “And then I’m borrowing your car.”

Ronan looked up sharply at that. “What?”

Blue grinned out at the road. “Oh, good,” she said. “I thought you’d gone catatonic. I just need to get some stuff. You’ll be fine with Adam for a bit, right?”

“Yes?” Ronan said uncertainly. “You aren’t just taking the car to show your hick friends, are you?”

Blue shot him a quick scowl. “I think I liked you better when you weren’t talking.”

Ronan scoffed at that, but he didn’t offer any of the insulting rejoinders he usually had on standby. As they pulled into the parking lot for Boyd’s garage, he asked, “How long will you be gone?”

She shrugged. “Thirty minutes, or so.” She tapped the horn, and a moment later, Adam stepped out of the garage. He didn’t look particularly surprised to see them, but he’d known where they were going; maybe he’d been preparing for this. He waited by the garage until Ronan got out of the car, and then he closed the distance to pull him into a hug. Ronan crushed his face into Adam’s shirt while Adam looked down tenderly and rubbed Ronan’s back. His lips moved with words that Blue couldn’t hear, and Ronan clung to him like a lifeline.

In the aftermath of an afternoon that had already twisted knives into her heart, this should have been nothing, but it was this image of her most guarded friend allowing himself so vulnerable that finally brought tears to Blue’s eyes. She had to look away as she wiped away the sorrow that had been building for weeks. Needing to get away, and wanting to offer her friends some privacy, she forced herself back together and put the car back in drive.

By the time she returned forty minutes later, Blue had banished the tears, and she’d loaded up the back seat with shopping bags. She relinquished the driver’s seat to Adam without a word, displacing a couple containers of confetti cupcakes as she climbed into the back. Ronan slid back into the passenger’s seat, silent and brooding. Once Adam had fixed the seat, he reached over and squeezed Ronan’s hand in quick reassurance. Blue couldn’t see enough of him to be sure, but she thought that Ronan’s shoulders relaxed just a little bit with Adam’s touch.

“Where to?” Adam asked, already pulling the car towards the exit. It occurred to Blue suddenly that he’d had to leave work early, though both he and Ronan seemed at ease over it. Maybe they had both accepted that Ronan needed Adam right now, or maybe Adam would have left for Noah’s birthday anyways. Either way, she was glad he was here. “Blue?”

Blue blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Monmouth. We need to get Gansey.” Adam nodded. He was clearly already headed towards the factory, where Gansey was working on an essay that would have to be abandoned like everything else today. Maybe the world kept going, but people still had to stop for grief.

“And then?” Adam asked.

Blue looked around at the bags of party supplies surrounding her, everything that she thought Noah might like, from glittery stickers and temporary tattoos to (biodegradable) confetti and silly string. The only thing missing was Noah himself, but Blue didn’t let herself think about that.

“And then,” she said, “we go to Noah. Today is a day for celebration.”


End file.
